This edition of COAL is going to be a two-fer, because the next two cars after the 1963 Plymouth were (1) not that memorable, or (2) not kept all that long. When the Belvedere finally reached the point where it had to be replaced, the car that I ended up with was a 1965 Pontiac Catalina four door hardtop. This was not the car I really wanted but as a poor college student I could not afford the lightly used Roadrunner of my dreams. I was in no position at that point to finance any vehicle so I was limited to whatever ride I could pay cash for. I purchased the “Cat” off the back row at the local Pontiac dealer; I want to say that I paid $400 dollars for it but it could have been a little more or a little less.

The Pontiac was certainly in better condition than my used up Plymouth. It had the 389 CID V8 and THM; while it was too big and too heavy to provide the same level of acceleration as its predecessor, it was certainly a fine car for the open road. This was before the national 55 MPH speed limit of the mid-seventies and the Cat would maintain 75-80 MPH without even breathing hard. You would want to dial it back some for any real turns but on the Interstate you could make good time.

I acquired the Pontiac not long before I moved away from my hometown in order to continue my college education. I had attended the local community college for my first couple of years and was able to live at home. This resulted in me putting lots of miles on the car as I travelled back and forth to class, going to work, etc. Things were quite different once I moved to Lexington to attend the University of Kentucky. My first year there I lived on campus and there were times when I didn’t use the car for a week or more. The campus itself was fairly compact and there were many restaurants and bars right on the periphery; it was often easier to just walk rather than having to deal with finding a parking spot or possibly being hassled by the gendarmes.

I don’t know how many miles I put on the Cat during the year and a half I owned it but I’m sure it wasn’t much more than 15,000 miles (compared to the 45k+ I put on the Plymouth). I didn’t know how many miles I put on the Pontiac because the odometer, when it tried to roll over to 50,000, broke. An interesting side note, my family purchased three different well-used Pontiacs from the back row of the local dealer within a year or so. All had 49XXX miles when purchased and the odometer on all three broke when trying to roll over to 50,000. A cynical person might think that the dealer was rolling back the odometers in order to make these cars more appealing to the bargain shoppers.

I have only one semi-interesting story involving the Pontiac and it is less about the car than me and some friends. Cincinnati is about an hour’s drive north of Lexington so it was within easy reach for cultural excursions and recreational opportunities. At that time one could legally drink 3.2% beer in Ohio at age 18, while you needed to be 21 to drink “real” beer or liquor. As countless people had discovered before us, if you looked reasonably close to 21 and had money to spend, it was not hard to find places that would serve you liquor. One Saturday night myself and a couple of friends made the trek northward to see if the women in Cincinnati were any more receptive to our advances than were the ones in Lexington (they were not). I parked the car on the street in downtown Cincinnati and we then spent the next several hours visiting local watering holes. Around midnight we decided it was time to leave and go back to Lexington; unfortunately none of us could remember exactly where I had parked the car. We walked up and down streets for at least an hour without any luck; fortunately it was not cold and the exercise and passage of time did help us sober up, at least a little. Finally, around 1:30 or so we managed to stumble across the Cat, presumably where I left it. In the 40+ years since then I have never once came as close to misplacing my car as that night; I suppose we can call that progress, of a sort.

Time moved on, as it will, and early in the second semester of my fourth year of college I realized that I was not going to graduate that spring. I had changed majors a couple of times and was not going to have enough credits for a degree in anything. As I was tired of never having any money I decided to withdraw from school and get a full-time job. I ended up working for a fourth rate loan company as the outside bill collector; this was the type of company one went to for money after your grandma had turned you down. One of the things I remember is that we had customers who had borrowed $500 to buy a car and that their total payback was in the neighborhood of $1200. Most of these people had plenty of experience in dodging bill collectors and knew how to make themselves scarce. Working in town was bad enough but at least you had a street address to rely on. Many of the customers lived in the surrounding counties and their only address might be “RR#2, East Outhouse, Kentucky”. It was almost impossible to find these people if they didn’t want to be found. This job was certainly an eye-opener, perhaps we need to start a series called “Jobs of a Lifetime”.

Now that I was gainfully employed I decided that I deserved a new car. Although I really, really wanted a Datsun 240Z, my finances dictated something at the entry level. After some research and cross shopping I narrowed my search down to a Toyota Corolla and a VW Super Beetle, each of these was around $2300 equipped with an AM radio and little else. I felt that the Corolla was the better car but I just could not make myself pull the trigger on the purchase. Instead I purchased a 1973 VW Super Beetle, light blue like the pictures here. A close friend had driven a ’61 Beetle from our junior year of high school up until a couple of months before he graduated from college in 1973.

This car was certainly slow, any kind of rise on the highway meant downshifting to 3rd gear, but it was thrifty (30 MPG) and was fun to drive in that row hard to keep up with traffic sort of way. I hoped to capture that with my Super Beetle but no luck; not only was my VW terribly slow, it wasn’t even very economical. I didn’t get more than 21-22 MPG out of the car, probably because you had to drive it like you stole it to keep from getting run over. It wasn’t even much fun to drive, if anything it felt ponderous and was not responsive at all. I knew this purchase was a mistake within a couple of weeks of making it.

After six or seven months of VW ownership I had bailed on bill collecting and was working as a kitchen manager for a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisee. These folks were in the process of building two new KFC stores in the Lexington area and, in the interim, were running another KFC restaurant located in a somewhat marginal section of town. I worked there for several months before the new stores opened and I was sort of hoping that someone would steal the VW so I could collect on the insurance. Of course no else wanted a Super Beetle either so every night after work it was still where I had parked it.

But then, in the spring of 1974 the OPEC oil embargo hit the U.S. in a huge way. Suddenly, small cars were the hot ticket as people rushed to replace their full-sized boats with something, anything, more economical to operate. Without much effort at all I was able to sell the Super Beetle for several hundred dollars more than I had paid for it when it was new. I had been looking for a different car and I took this as a sign that I should purchase something more interesting. Did I succeed? Stay tuned for our next installment on COAL.

40 Comments

Interesting that the poncho was not that memorable; I’m guessing it was five years old when you bought it so the 65 fullsize shape was yet to be considered the styling classic it is today. Even with 4 doors. hehehe

Yup, in 1970, these were just dime-a-dozen older and aging cars. They were everywhere. There’s something about cars back then at about 5-7 years old, that made them look particularly out of the current style. There’s a world of stylistic difference between a ’65 Catalina and a ’68 GTO, but only three years of time.

We had the previous generation Catalina 4-door hardtop (1964 model) that I remember fondly. It had the 389 V8 and Roto-Hydramatic transmission with the “S” setting on the shift quadrant. (These transmissions had a reputation for being troublesome but we never had any problems with it.) It was a nice, comfortable, roomy cruiser.

But at the time it was just an ordinary driver, not considered anything special, and it got used up and tossed aside like so many others. Would love to have one like it again today!

I really like 1965 GM B bodies. I still own a 1965 Buick Wildcat, also a 4 door hardtop.

About your odometer stopping at 50,000 miles, something similar happened with my former 1993 Toyota pickup, at 199,999 kms, the odometer wouldn’t turn to 200,000!

After a few days with a stuck odometer, I removed it and fixed it with some lubricant! I currently have another 1993 Toyota pickup that I bought with 125,000 miles (this one is a US model, the other one was a Canadian model). When the speedometer reached 199,999 miles, I wondered if it would stick like my former one but it didn’t! It’s now past 227,000 miles and still working!

Maybe grille replacement is a common trick on the ’65s. I found this ’65 Bonneville several years back, which appeared to be completely stock except for a Grand Prix grille. It did suit the car very nicely, perhaps more so than the original!

I guess they either replaced it as they liked the style better or because of a collision damage.

I remember back in the eighties how so many cars from the 1960s to the 1980s had their grilles or whole front clip replaced with one from similar model or from different model year as the insurance wouldn’t pay for new parts and they didn’t bother finding the exact replacement used parts. .

The steering wheel in the feature article (assumedly NOT his exact car, but a thorough restoration) may have been replaced but they did come in a two-spoke, no-horn ring version. There was also a three-spoke with “wood” rim.

Also note the El Strippo blank look of the feature article car’s dash…no heater, no radio. Looks jarringly empty surrounded by all that chrome.

I’ve known Pontiac dashboards of the mid- and late 1960s since age 7 (my parents’ friend was a sales manager and we owned a number of them), and this is the very first time I’ve seen the dash of a full-size ’60s Pontiac with no heater controls at all. Or in other words, missing both “radios” because the Pontiac heater controls (with or without a/c) resembled a pushbutton radio with tuning knobs at the ends, as most readers here probably know.

The nicer versions, GP and Bonneville, had real wood veneer dashboard trim in 1965 and ’66, although when I bought my ’66 Bonneville convertible in December 1974 someone had stripped it off, revealing not the textured black finish of the Catalina but a plain aluminum panel with a uniform dull finish, which was OK with me since everything worked.

My car also had the two-spoke wheel like the one pictured here, but with a strip of wood trim within each spoke. They tended to be come unglued. Both the steering wheel and dashboard veneer were rather ordinary-looking for real wood, but not nearly as cheap-looking as the fake appliqué that Pontiac used in 1967 and thereafter.

Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. The Toyota Corolla would have been the bees knees compared to the VW Beetle. I owned a 74 Beetle, pretty much the same experiences as yours. I managed to drive mine to the west coast and back from Manitoba in the mid 70’s.. Not much fun on the highways, and the gas mileage was nothing to write home about either.

By 1973, Corrollas were selling like hotcakes in California. How did they hold up to salted roads in the Midwest? Probably not too well.

1971 was about the last “good” year for air cooled VW’s. Due to poor thermal control, they did not respond well to emissions tuning. NOX was particularly difficult. So, power and mileage suffered. They did run very well on unleaded gasoline, due to already low compression and steel valve seat inserts.

The opening photo really takes me back! A friend of mine bought a ’65 Catalina 4-door sedan around 1981. The exterior was gold metallic that still held a shine and the interior was tan cloth. Really an attractive car.

I got to drive it a few times, mostly around town. The 389 2-bbl and THM 400 seemed pretty peppy, but quiet and smooth. Impressive, really, for a 16 year old car in those days.

The dashboards in the early ’60s Pontiacs were beautiful to look at. IIRC, they featured an ammeter, with idiot lights for temperature and oil pressure. My ’62 Bonneville also had a green “Cold” light. I don’t think my friend’s ’65 had one though.

The 65 model year seemed to be the apex of GM B body styling…..The hardtop roof design was shared among the GM divisions…..My Dad had a 65 Impala 4 door hardtop and he said that the 65 was the last Impala that he liked styling-wise.

From about 1973 to the early ’80s, my dad had a succession of VWs, starting with a red ’64 Karmann Ghia. He bought it as a work car, in response to the first gas crisis, because his ’69 Impala and 100 mile per day commute were no longer a good mix.

I think he paid around $400 for the Ghia, which was probably about $350 too much, as the engine was on its last legs. We nicknamed it the “snap, crackle and pop wagen” because it backfired a lot. When the engine finally died, he used the Impala and a chain to pull the Ghia to a VW dealer for a factory rebuilt engine. The one they recommended was, I believe, from a ’66 model which gave a notable performance improvement.

Dad was quite happy with Ghia v2.0 and it gave several years of reliable service. Many times I helped him change the Gulfpride oil and clean the oil strainer. He also found an excellent private VW mechanic in the town he worked, so the Ghia received professional attention for valve adjustments & etc. He kept detailed fuel and maintenance records, which showed right around 30 mpg for his commute.

His later VWs were Type 1s, but not new enough to be Super Beetles. His mileage results were similar to the Ghia’s. (Possibly because the engines were pre-smog?)

I had exactly the same thought about the Beetle. All it needed was a basic tune up. Back then this meant new points, plugs, wires, adjusting the valve clearances and taking care of the air cleaner. The result was Vrrrrroom!

Fuel economy of the later Beetles really did suffer. The old 1200 would readily get about 32 mpg. That dropped to 29 or so for the 1300, and 26 for the 1500 and 25 for the 1600. And even a bit less for the later ones, like this Super Beetle, due to smog controls. In magazine tests, it was not uncommon for them to get 24 or so mpg.

The VW engine was not intrinsically all that efficient. Don’t forget that several hp were perpetually lost to that blower, one of the reasons we don’t have air cooled engines anymore.

The 1200 cc VW was limited to 72 mph due to its small carb. The later ones would go faster, but that really pushed down the fuel economy, as the Beetle was not very aerodynamic.

Even with a good tune up, it’s almost impossible to get more than 25 mpg out of these later Beetles, in normal driving.

From what i remember, the 1500/1600 Beetles were not at all common in Europe, because of either/both higher taxes In some countries) and certainly because of the higher fuel consumption. Seems to me most of those late Beetles over there were the 1302/1303 variety. The 1300cc engine really was the best compromise between power and efficiency.

nikita

Posted March 21, 2016 at 11:57 AM

Even to the end of Mexico production, the 1300 was the most common engine size. I dont know about Brazil. The relatively square 77mm bore and 69mm stroke probably made the 1300 better than the short stroke 1200 or large bore 1500 and 1600 for efficient combustion.

Yes, the ’73-’74 Beetles were relatively thirsty, but the ’75-’76 models with fuel injection and catalytic converter (CA only) returned decent mileage. I got 30mpg in town and 33 on long drives – once getting as high as 36 from my new ’75 “Le Grande Bug”, while my ’71 usually gave 26-30mpg. Driveability was great, too. From ’77 on it all regressed because of more stringent emission standards.

My Uncle Bob bought a 65 Catalina sedan around 1968 or so. They also owned a 64 Galaxie 500 4 door hardtop. It was amazing how much more modern the Pontiac felt.

It was dark turquoise with turquoise interior, a beautiful car. They kept both the Ford and the Pontiac into the early 70s. The Ford became the beater for the kids while the Catalina remained the “good car”. It was a very good car that served them well.

Would you like to be more specific about what the ’49 and ’64 Ford shared under the skin? To my knowledge, absolutely nothing, except some bolts perhaps.

The ’49 chassis was substantially updated in 1954 with a new ball joint front suspension. And the 1957 had a completely new frame design. Which was revised again in 1960. Engines, transmissions, etc were all different.

My VW was a light, almost powder, blue. Unfortunately I don’t have photos of these cars from long ago so representative examples had to be sourced from the Internet.

Ah yes, working as a debt collector. As I mentioned this was a very fourth rate company; the last thing they wanted was to have to take the vehicle back, nearly all of them were worth a lot less than what was owed on them. At that time in the state of Kentucky the lien holder was not allowed to just repo a car without the owner’s permission (I understand this might have been different in other states). The process involved going to a judge and obtaining a written order to take the car; this cost money and would, of course, be added to the amount owed.

Trying to collect money from our customers was interesting; I had dogs set on me numerous times but always managed to avoid getting bitten. I had a couple of women offer sex in return for late payments (I always declined, basically because I didn’t have the money, even if I had wanted to). I went to one customer’s house, knocked on the door and asked for the customer. The man who answered the door said the customer didn’t live there any longer and he had no idea where he was living. I found out later that the guy who answered the door was the man I was looking for. Probably the worst experience I had was when one guy offered to shoot me if I didn’t leave; I was young and dumb enough to try and reason with him instead of just leaving right away. I don’t really think he had a gun (at least not with him) but, looking back, that was an incredibly stupid decision.

If there was ever a car that BEGGED for fender skirts, it was full-size Pontiacs from the mid-60s through early 70s…that skeg line low on the sides just looks funky to me when it is broken up by the wheel opening.

Both the GP and Bonneville came with fender skirts, 1965-68; likewise the Bonneville in 1969-70. However, I’ve seen photos of a ’67 Bonneville with no skirts and bright trim around the rear wheel openings, so this evidently was a delete option.

(Bonneville wagons had no fender skirts, although some owners added them later.)

I had a ’73 Super Beetle (Sport Bug), and it was indeed very slow. Until I got the “How to hot rod your VW engine” book and built up a strong running 1835 cc engine. That transformed the car into a really fun ride. It would still get around 25 mpg when driven normally. It was fun going up the Grapevine in July 75 mph windows up AC running and passing all the cars struggling to climb the pass in a bright yellow VW Beetle.

Grandfather had a ’65 Bonneville convertible with the 389. Even in that heavy car the engine pulled strongly. His car was one of the few that looked much better with it’s fender skirts.

My 68 bug got hideous mileage. It had a CA hang on NOx device, a crude EGR. I took that off and it ran a lot better but still the mileage was about 20. Mine had been rebuilt because it had burned and dropped a valve. The reason it did that was that the flexible EGR hose was chafed and leaking vacuum. Eventually I figured out that someone had drilled the carb jet to compensate for the vacuum leak instead of just replacing the metal hose. I put a new jet in and it ran a whole lot better…..and the mileage still sucked.

Then I got a 69 Cougar with a 351W and a 4 barrel, a lot more fun than a VW!